What Would Jay Gould Do if AI Was Stealing His Content
Reprinted with permission from ON_DISCOURSE
What if a ruthless operator like Jay Gould was running a media company whose content was being stolen by AI? (Pick your favorite robber baron from the 1860s looking to maximize leverage against content. Maybe you’re a Vanderbilt fan.)
If you were Gould, what might you do?
Collude and sue. Get every premium publisher together and form a content cabal that sets prices, unifies around a shared user identity — critical in an age of AI bots pretending to be humans anyway — pools data and analytics, and negotiates as a bloc. Then set up industry-wide monitoring to sue for every single instance content gets stolen. (Not legal, or possible, but whatever. We’re pretending it’s the 1860s. This is a thought experiment.)
Block AI and search. Take Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince up on his offer and block all web crawling for AI and social while you’re at it. Starve the models of any information after 2024 and build a moat around all new fact-based content. (Have fun with those gift guide ideas from 2023!)
Use social like a DTC brand. Only post content to drive real business outcomes. Figure out LTV and CAC models that work, use paid spend to acquire subscribers, upsell superfans and use your handles to generate direct ad revenue. (Call me if you want to discuss that last point — this can happen right now.)
Make your website awesome. Now that you’re invisible to search and AI and using social as a marketing channel, your website can become what users want it to be and what your new business model requires — not what Google algorithmically demanded. Make it a single-screen web-based app. Get rid of that right rail. Make the ad experience immersive. Use AI to personalize the hell out of it. Go back to whatever you wanted the web to be in 1996. There are no more rules.
Reinvent measurement. Now that you have a monopolistic content cabal sharing identity and first-party data, partner with credit card companies and use AI to track conversion. Invent a new mid-funnel metric around intent. Map identity back to credit card conversion data to prove performance from the mid-funnel. Negative sell against last-click attribution — frame it as a land of dark patterns and fat thumbs.
Acquire talent, share readers. To rebuild the top of the funnel, sign influential creators to exclusive publisher-only deals. Continue to use social like a DTC brand. Force your cabal of publishers to use AI to cross-promote each other’s content, optimizing against clicks, LTV, etc.
Is this possible? No. Would Gould even do this? Probably not.
In his day, Gould wasn’t on the content side. He was a pipes guy — railroads and telegraph lines. But I think he’d recognize that in the AI era, content has become a pipe.
My point: Great, high-quality journalism and new facts are super valuable to the AI-powered future.
Unlocking that scarcity could take some ruthless behavior.
Big shouts to ON_Discourse for leading me to provocations like this.
